Twenty years after Taking the Long Way, The Chicks are returning to the record that transformed a political backlash into one of the defining albums of their career. The anniversary tour reaches the Beacon Theatre for three nights in October, placing songs written under extraordinary public pressure inside one of New York’s most intimate major concert halls.

The Chicks play the Beacon on Oct. 10, 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. The tour marks the 20th anniversary of the 2006 album and the trio’s first tour in three years.

The record arrived after Natalie Maines’ criticism of President George W. Bush triggered boycotts and hostility within country radio. What followed became a case study in the policing of political speech inside popular entertainment, but reducing the album to controversy misses its musical achievement.

Taking the Long Way turned defensiveness into craft. The songs carried anger, exhaustion, domestic reflection and the peculiar experience of discovering that an audience can decide it owns a performer’s acceptable opinions.

“Not Ready to Make Nice” became the obvious emblem because it rejected the ritual apology expected from public figures after controversy. But an anniversary concert can restore the surrounding album, allowing quieter songs to sit beside the anthem rather than behind it.

The record after the backlash

The Beacon is well suited to that reassessment. The theater is large enough for a major act but intimate enough to preserve instrumental detail. Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire’s playing has always been essential to the group’s identity, grounding its pop reach in acoustic musicianship.

Anniversary tours can be cynical when an album is treated as a collectible object whose track list must be reproduced for nostalgia. This record carries a different kind of historical weight because the circumstances around it remain legible. Arguments about musicians, politics and audience entitlement have hardly disappeared.

The passage of two decades changes those arguments without resolving them. Country music has shifted, the group changed its name from the Dixie Chicks to The Chicks, and the political culture surrounding celebrity speech has become faster and more relentless.

Hearing the songs now therefore means hearing both 2006 and 2026. The anger belongs to its original moment, but the question underneath it — who gets to decide what an artist may say without losing an audience — remains current.

The Chicks’ Taking the Long Way 20th Anniversary Tour plays the Beacon Theatre Oct. 10, 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. This is a preview based on announced tour information, not a review of a performance.

The tour itself is deliberately compact. The announced itinerary favors theaters and concert halls rather than arenas, giving the anniversary a scale closer to the songs. In New York, the three Beacon dates are Oct. 10, 12 and 13, all at 8 p.m.

The album’s commercial and critical response was emphatic. Taking the Long Way won the Grammy for album of the year, while “Not Ready to Make Nice” won record and song of the year. Those awards did not erase the country-radio backlash, but they complicated any simple story in which the controversy ended the group’s relevance.

Twenty years later, the strongest reason to revisit the record is not vindication. It is distance. Songs written inside a crisis can finally be heard as songs again, with the headlines receding enough for arrangements, harmonies and less famous tracks to return to the foreground.

The Beacon is a good room for that kind of listening. The anniversary may bring people in because they remember the argument. The music has to justify why they should stay.